Senate Releases Final 635-Page Draft of Clarity Act, Senator Lummis States the Bill is Ready
Senators Cynthia Lummis, John Boozman, and Tim Scott released the final text of the "Digital Asset Market Clarity Act" (CLARITY Act), spanning 635 pages, before the Senate's vote to end debate on Tuesday (September 15). Lummis stated on social media, "After a year of intense, daily bipartisan negotiations, this bill is ready."
The core new addition in the final text is a revised ethical clause that requires all federally elected officials, judges, and their spouses to divest financial interests linked to digital assets or place them in a blind trust; Lummis called it "one of the strictest ethical restrictions in American history."
The bill also grants state attorneys general new enforcement powers to take action against violations of digital asset issuance bans and exchanges listing banned assets; additionally, it establishes a "safe harbor" provision for blockchain developers, exempting them from traditional currency transfer regulations.
To address concerns from community banks, the bill includes a "circuit breaker" mechanism—authorizing Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to limit stablecoin yields/rewards if their attractiveness leads to significant deposit outflows from community banks; reports indicate that this version has incorporated over 120 specific demands from Democrats.
However, procedural voting still requires at least 7 Democratic senators' support to reach the 60-vote threshold to end debate; Senate Democratic Leader Schumer convened a party meeting on Sunday evening to discuss the matter, but no results have been disclosed; according to Polymarket's predictive market data, the probability of the bill passing after the release of the updated text is priced at around 30%.
Meanwhile, the U.S. branch of the international anti-corruption watchdog "Transparency International" directly criticized the new ethical clause—its Deputy Executive Director Scott Greytak pointed out that despite months of negotiations and the pressure of the "Trump family earning over $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency business by 2025" disclosure, the bill presented by the Senate majority "does not clearly close the main channels for him to earn this money, nor does it prevent him from continuing to profit in this way"; specifically, the new ethical clause does not require the divestment of commercial profit-sharing agreements, licensing rights, or family-related entities, nor does it prohibit the continued use of his name and likeness for minting and selling new digital assets, and the related ethical clauses will expire in January 2029, erasing accountability for previous violations.
Lummis also warned in her original statement, "Voting against it on Tuesday means opposing real ethical reform regarding politicians' personal investments, ceding America's leadership in the digital asset space to foreign competitors, and leaving the American public unprotected in the digital asset market... Democrats have gotten what they wanted, now they should say 'yes.'"
Source: Public Information
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The legislative path of this bill has been a continuous tug-of-war—its House version H.R. 3633 passed with 294 votes back in July 2025, and the Senate Banking Committee advanced it with a bipartisan vote of 15 to 9 in May this year; this final 635-page draft is the product of a year of "daily negotiations"; meanwhile, the Trump family has continued to expand its cryptocurrency business during this legislative tug-of-war (reporting over $1.4 billion in income by 2025), making this legislation, originally intended to regulate the industry, objectively evolve into a political game surrounding the President's own conflicts of interest.
In terms of funding and interests, the bill's "safe harbor" provision and state attorneys general enforcement powers essentially delineate clearer compliance boundaries for blockchain developers and exchanges, reducing their risk of being subject to retrospective enforcement, thus allowing capital that had been on the sidelines due to regulatory uncertainty to enter the market; the "circuit breaker" mechanism authorizes the Treasury Secretary to intervene when stablecoins siphon deposits from community banks, protecting the traditional banking system's deposit pool from being quietly drained by high stablecoin yields, which is a direct product of balancing the demands for "financial innovation" and "financial stability" in bipartisan negotiations.
The negotiation of ethical clauses involving the Trump family is similar to other legislative processes pushed during the tenures of U.S. presidents, which ultimately faced scrutiny due to their own or their relatives' commercial interests; however, this time the ethical clauses are being written into the bill while the President is still in office, and his family's cryptocurrency business income has been publicly disclosed, marking the first time digital asset regulatory legislation directly touches on "the current President's own commercial interests," a sensitive area that has rarely been addressed directly in federal financial regulatory legislation.
Essentially, this is a power struggle between regulatory change and vested interests—mechanisms in which the bill's drafters attempt to gain moral legitimacy and Democratic support by stating "voluntary acceptance of the strictest ethical restrictions in history," but Transparency International's criticism reveals core vulnerabilities: the ethical clauses only constrain conflicts of interest in "holding" and "new investments" but do not address more concealed and harder-to-regulate channels of interest transfer, such as "brand licensing" and "family business profit-sharing," and the clauses have expiration dates and exempt past accountability; this means that even if the bill passes smoothly, the controversy surrounding the President's conflicts of interest is unlikely to end with the legislation's completion, but will shift to the next phase of the struggle over "how effectively these ethical clauses are executed."
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The stricter the clauses are written, the deeper the loopholes often hide.
Once ethical restrictions have an expiration date, they are no longer restrictions but deferrals.
When legislation cannot keep up with the speed of income, the law ultimately only pursues form.